Family Matters: The Broadway Premiere of Stick Fly

Those filtering down a very crowded West Forty-eighth Street last night likely encountered a bottleneck in front of the Cort Theater, where onlookers were craning their necks at the collection of fedoras, bespoke suits, and fur arriving for the Broadway premiere of Alicia Keys’s Stick Fly. Keys, who has had a prolific few weeks—performing at the Fourth Annual MoMa Film Benefit in November, appearing in her documentary project, Keep a Child Alive, which aired on World AIDS Day, and composing the score for Stick Fly, written by Lydia R. Diamond—moved smoothly through the fanfare in her Helmut Lang leather leggings. “I approached doing the music for a play very similarly to creating an album,” she said of her work on the production, a fast-talking family drama that invites you into the Martha’s Vineyard home of the LeVays, where two sons, played by Dulé Hill and a brazen Mekhi Phifer (both of whom, when you watch them for two hours, make an excellent argument for investing in a personal trainer), are home for the weekend to introduce their respective girlfriends to mom and dad. It’s a meet-the-parents scenario in ways that are agonizingly familiar (am I allowed to touch the coffee machine?) and others that needle at more provocative questions—ideas about family, race, class, and relationships—in very real and often awkward ways that may serve as a foreboding reminder about family gatherings on the holiday horizon. Then some secrets are thrown in—of the incredibly scandalous variety—and the household (and stage) brims with things that no one is supposed to know.

“The play is so emotional,” said Keys. “It takes you on this whole journey—you’re laughing, you’re shouting, you’re doing so many things all at once—and I really wanted the music to be able to take you on that journey as well.” Though the production has the occasional salacious soap-opera moment, the production’s cast—including a sharp-tongued Condola Rashad, whose lithe movement throughout the scenes is made all the more enjoyable by the fact that she frequently brings scenes to a halt with an eye roll or speedy, crescendoing retort—has a palpable esprit de corps. “I’ve never run into six people that like each other so much,” said proud director Kenny Leon.